Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm deputy editor of The Spectator. I'm joined today by Jim Antel, who is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner, and we're going to be discussing

Trump's popularity, his unpopularity, and the looming possibility of Trump fatigue. So, Jim, we've

seen that Trump's first, I think it's his first approval, first proper approval rating is at 45%, which is a sort of

historic low, I think, for a new president.

Is that terrible news for Donald Trump, or is it expected?

Well, Donald Trump's top line approval number and his relatively high disapproval rating is bad

from this perspective in that this is the honeymoon period for a new

president. So historically speaking, this is usually about as popular as a president gets,

barring, you know, some major event that really unifies the country, you know, like the Persian

Gulf War or 9-11 attacks. So, you know, it gives him not a very

high place to move down from if there's any controversy. So from that perspective, the numbers

are not very good. However, there's a big caveat to that in that Trump does remain popular

with a lot of core groups that

voted for him and his approval rating among the white voters who will decide the midterm elections

still remains high enough.

So if you look at his support from core demographic groups that are the most likely people who are going

to vote in the midterm elections, that's still good news for Republicans.

Assuming that those remain the voters who turn out, you know, maybe people who are anti-Trump

will turn out in numbers greater than they've turned out in previous midterm elections.

That assumption didn't work for Hillary Clinton, so that's a reason to be skeptical that will happen

in the midterm elections, but you never know. But right now, Trump is at least holding steady

...